Thanks Dave, Happy New Year to you too, that should be a great read.
Are these pictures credited anywhere ?
I can see one of our members mentioned in the References section.
What does ""some real "cut and paste" work"" mean please ?
Col

As a former botanist I'm amused by the contrast between the presented exact nomenclature of chemical compounds and the very sloppy description of the species under investigation. "Petals" indeed. My ears cringe.

The authors indeed used "cut and paste" by cutting off sections of the ligulate flowers and glueing them onto different flower heads. Clearly they - probably unknowingly - altered important aspects such as conical cell structures and other related optical properties, plus whatever change brought about by wilting. Thus one cannot exclude other, non-studied factors from having had effects in these experiments. They made nowhere in the paper any reference to the fact that pollinators visit the disk flowers not the ligulate ones and evidently had no control whatsoever as to the UV-related properties of the disk flowers in the studied populations.

Thanks, Dave, for the references. And there are lots of similar references on the right side. So several things to pursue.
(I was familiar with the first paper.)

Petal references and certain lack of control in the experiment aside, these are quite interesting papers because they identify the underlying pigments, etc. This is something I have been studying a bit - just now reading the book Nature's Palette - the Science of Plant Color by David Lee
which is an interesting overview but slightly "sketchy" on the explanations.

Bjørn, I would say that you continue to be a botanist - no 'former' about it.

I now know why I felt drawn to his work, we were born perhaps 35 km apart in Yorkshire (that's where James Cook RN came from which began all this Australian thing).

He makes several well scattered comments that "The part played by UV receptors is little understood". I think he is a master of understatement. That made me feel better, perhaps there's something for me to do after all in this UV world.